It’s not long until Microsoft reveals to the world what’s under the hood in its upcoming Windows Phone 7.5 update, codenamed "Mango". On May 24th at 10am EDT, Microsoft will be holding a VIP Preview party in New York and London concurrently, said to "lift the curtain on the next major release of Windows Phone". But what should we expect from this announcement? We will summarise here what had been officially unveiled during the Mobile World Congress, MIX 2011, and TechEd 2011 events, as well as what was leakedduringthe past few weeks. We’ll also add in a few speculations of our own, just to keep things interesting. So here we go:

On the hardware side, it is widely speculated that Microsoft will be announcing their Chassis-2 specifications, particularly given the fact that Nokia is set to manufacture a variety of different hardware which could potentially target lower-priced markets (perhaps maybe a glimpse at the new Nokia Windows Phones coming at the end of this year?). In addition, besides the already-announced gyroscope support, it is also speculated that Windows Phone 7.5 might support front-facing cameras and NFC integration.

On the software side, one thing that comes up to our mind would be Skype integration. Given the acquisition has not yet been finalised yet (pending regulatory approval), we do not expect Microsoft to be natively integrating Skype into the phone. However, Microsoft already announced that the Skype app will be coming to Windows Phone 7.5 during MIX 2011, but given that they pulled the demo of the app last-minute during the keynote, it’d be interesting to see if something else might be in store for Skype.

Of course, we certainly hope Microsoft has more surprises for us on the day. Will we see finally multiple Windows Live Calendar support? Or perhaps Windows Live Mesh integration? Or will we have to wait until Windows Phone 8 (codenamed "Apollo")? There’s always room for that extra nice-to-have feature to be added to the Windows Phone feature list. We only hope that Microsoft will bring us the update sooner rather than later. What else would you like to see in the coming updates? Leave us a comment below!